At a virtual tribute on July 21, Miriam Adelson said something about Lindsey Graham that was meant as warmth and functions as documentation.
Her late husband's secretary, Betty, confirmed it to her: there was not a day Sheldon didn't talk with Lindsey. “They talked about Israel. Lindsey gave him advice. Sheldon gave him advice, and they had fun.”
Graham died July 11 at 71. The event was hosted by the Israeli-American Council. Adelson recalled meeting him around 1990 on an AIPAC mission that flew freshman Republican congressmen to Israel — a trip she said she, Sheldon and two business partners paid for.
Take the affection at face value
I think it was sincere, and I'm not going to write a column that treats a widow's tribute as a confession.
She described his eyes as pure and blue, said you could see what he was thinking, said she and Sheldon fell in love with him. She told a story about Graham choosing to meet ordinary tourists in the Sands rather than sit in the VIP room with John McCain. She compared his adoption of his younger sister to Sheldon's care for his first wife's children.
Those are the details of a real friendship, not a transaction. People who spend thirty years in politics make actual friends, and the reflex to reduce every relationship to money is its own kind of cynicism.
And now the part that has to be said anyway
Sheldon Adelson was, for a decade, among the largest political donors in the United States. Miriam Adelson has been since. A daily phone call, for years, between a sitting United States senator and a man of that financial weight is not an ordinary friendship. It is a channel.
It doesn't matter that both parties were sincere. It doesn't matter that Graham held his views on Israel before he ever met them — he plainly did, and nobody who watched him for thirty years thinks otherwise.
What matters is structural. Most Americans have no daily line to a senator. The relationship began, by Adelson's own telling, with a trip she paid for.
The thing I actually object to
Not the friendship. The invisibility.
We learned about this from a eulogy. Not from a disclosure, not from a filing, not from a reporter. A tribute video, quoted by Jewish Insider, and then it circulated.
There is no rule requiring a senator to log who he speaks to daily. I'm not sure there could be one that wouldn't be worse than the problem. But the effect is that the most durable influence relationships in American politics are the ones with no paperwork, and we find out about them at funerals.
Campaign finance law is built to track dollars. Dollars are the easy part. The hard part is access, and access leaves no trail.
What I'd want said out loud
Graham was a hawk on Israel from the start, and voters in South Carolina returned him five times knowing it.
He was also, by this account, in daily conversation with one of the country's biggest donors about that exact subject for the better part of twenty years.
Both of those are true, and only one of them was on the ballot.
Add your perspective
Right: a long friendship built on shared conviction is not corruption, and Graham's record on Israel predates the Adelsons entirely. Left: this is what megadonor access looks like, described in the donor's own words, and the disclosure regime caught none of it. Center if you think the friendship was genuine and the access problem is real at the same time.
